


decessit vita matris

by DecayingPapers



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen, Haircuts, M/M, Pre-Canon, alternate title: ronan gets The Buzzcut, implied past and or unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-05 02:36:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15854478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DecayingPapers/pseuds/DecayingPapers
Summary: Gansey worries about Ronan, even though he can't put his finger on why exactly. Ronan grieves. Feelings are looked into and ignored, hair is cut and some of the burden is taken off Ronan's shoulders.





	decessit vita matris

As Gansey blinked sleep out of his eyes, the insistent noises from Monmouth’s bathroom didn’t cease. It was still dark outside, which was neither an indicator of what time it was, nor of the amount of sleep Gansey had just got, but it did make him sit up molasses-slow in the square of yellow streetlamp light on his bed. It took him a short while to even realise what had woken him up until a crash louder than before came from behind the closed bathroom door. That had him throwing the tangled sheets to the side and almost slipping on a towel one of them had left on the floor. 

Ever since Ronan had found his father’s body, there was always something gnawing at Gansey’s heart, making sure he knew where his friend was and whether what he was doing was relatively safe. It’s not that Ronan had been particularly careful or calm before, but that had been a summer thunderstorm, with warm air and the promise of an end. Ronan now, post that night, Ronan with his father’s blood under his fingernails and that terrifying body imprinted on the inside of his eyelids, was a natural disaster, period. There was a draught inside him, somehow, sharpening his stares and smiles, drying the tears he refused to cry and with them every ounce of softness Ronan had once carried. 

It was that dryness that made Gansey wary and cautious, trying to prevent- something, he didn’t know what, but he was well aware that the world as he knew it would be over once it happened.

With a chant of ‘don’t let it be too late’ getting louder in his mind, he opened the door to find an aftermath of a tornado inside, with Ronan being its wildly beating heart. After giving his friend a quick once-over, a sigh escaped Gansey’s mouth. They both had all the time in the world, all the time in the world until it ended. 

Ronan met Gansey’s questioning gaze like he’d answer an actual question, had the other boy been in a state to ask any - with a set jaw and furrowed brows, face stretching over how terribly he must have been screaming in his head. In his right hand, which, as Gansey noticed, trembled minutely, Ronan clutched a pair of scissors. Forcing himself to drag his eyes up towards his friend’s head once again, Gansey now glanced the patches of hair missing right over Ronan’s forehead. 

Gansey stepped closer, slowly, while the other boy still stared at him, as if it was only dawning on him that he’d been found. Keeping his movements gentle, Gansey extended his hand towards where Ronan was still holding on to the scissors, hand white-knuckled and shaking. 

‘Fucking don’t–’, escaped Ronan’s mouth, raw and angry, because he refused to sound pleading even if his whole body was begging him to.

‘I wasn’t going to’, Gansey answered steadily, trying his best to let Ronan know that he only wanted to help, had been wanting to help ever since that night. ‘Just… Let me, please, Ronan’, he tried and slowly reached for the scissors, prying them away from Ronan’s stiff fingers. His hands were warm, always so warm, especially with the not so distant memory of cooling blood on them.

Gansey though Ronan would protest, maybe snarl and tell him to get the fuck out or storm out of the bathroom and slam the door, but he didn’t. It might have had to do with the late hour (or early hour – they were both balancing between being awake and just not sleeping, a state they were more accustomed to than they should). Instead of blowing up, Ronan relaxed his fingers and allowed Gansey to take the scissors. He let himself be lead by the shoulders to the closed toilet and, at Gansey’s gentle push, sat down, shoulders sagging and head hanging low. It was an almost perfect mirror of what he looked like in church. Expectation hung in the air, heavy with guilt.

‘Are you sure?’ Gansey’s question rang off the unpainted walls. 

Ronan jerked his head up, eyes shining, and barked out, ‘Get the fuck on with it, Dick, or let me do it myself.’ Gansey knew what it translated into, knew it would break Ronan to be left alone right there, so he made him lift his chin and inspected the damage. 

There was a patch of shorter hair above Ronan’s left eye, but most of his curls hanged wetly past his ears. ‘Do you have clippers?’ Ronan shook his head but sat still, a perfect figure of a martyr about to be canonised. Gansey had noticed that the draught raging inside him had been drying up Ronan’s words too, often leaving only venom, curses and blasphemy behind. 

‘That’s fine’, Gansey went on, his hand steady on Ronan’s bare shoulder where some vines of his tattoo curled dangerously. ‘We will just cut it as short as possible and then buy clippers in the morning, alright?’ Ronan grunted in response, not protesting or leaving, and so Gansey began his task. He combed his fingers through the damp hair, an excuse already forming in his head. It was how it should be done, not because he could still remember what it had felt like to play with Ronan’s curls as they lied in the dusty attic at the Barns, drunk on cider stolen from the fridge and Gansey’s story of Owen Glendower. 

But even all the strong will in the world, practiced through fleeting acquaintances and unexplained feelings of loss, couldn’t keep Gansey’s longing teenage heart from grieving over that biggest missed chance in his life. He could bear numerous dead ends, clues that could have led his quest to completion but instead left him lost in side alleyways, he had made himself recover from countless lost friendships, survived being torn apart from people he was only beginning to get hope for. What Gansey could not take, what he was certain would haunt him to the ends of Earth, was this – his chance with Ronan snatched mercilessly right out of his hands. 

He was certain they had been getting somewhere. There had been shy hands brushing by accident or not at all, even more shy smiles and the inescapable air of possibility that only needed some validation, a heart-to-heart and that tiny bit of courage to become what they both longed. They had been getting somewhere, but that journey of light touches was cut short with Ronan’s terrible screams. 

Gansey knew he had changed, too, he couldn’t have not. There was more responsibility now, more caution, and he knew he didn’t trust himself enough to hold Roan’s broken heart in his hands, not only because he was scared it would cut him. So, he tried to convince himself it was over, that the fluttering in his chest whenever he thought about Ronan only had to do with worry and concern and that the persistent urge to just hold him was purely selfless and meant for comfort. 

Methodically separating Ronan’s hair into smaller sections almost allowed Gansey to file it away as another mindless task, something to substitute for the growing Henrietta model next to his bed. Almost, because every time he brushed Ronan’s forehead or shoulder, or, God forbid, rough cheek, Gansey came back crashing into the entirely too messy bathroom of Monmouth Manufacturing and was reminded of the situation he had found himself in – leaning over his best friend’s shrinking form, powerful if it had not been for Ronan’s ability to make him entirely helpless.

He made himself focus on making the haircut as clean as possible with the tools he had, which wasn’t much. The scissors were rather on the blunter side and Ronan wasn’t to be trusted not to move, either. Gansey did make it work, though. Strand after strand, the hair fell to the floor and, as Gansey neared the end, he realised what he had been witnessing – this was Ronan being reborn. It dawned on Gansey that never again would he see that boy as he’d known him, nor would he be able to believe Ronan had ever been anything but this vicious creature Gansey saw more and more clearly. 

Technically, Gansey had suspected why Ronan needed to do it; with a buzzed head, that enormous tattoo crawling onto his shoulders and neck, and a vocabulary made up mostly of profanities, he would scare other people more than he scared himself. It wasn’t an unbecoming look on him, as much as Gansey was not thinking about it – Ronan needed comfort first and foremost, not to be sucked into a romance that could leave him hurting even more. He deserved better, courting and gentleness, bright early mornings filled with easy smiles and casual touches. 

It made Gansey think of a photograph he’d seen at the Barns – it used to sit on a kitchen windowsill in a simple frame and showed the Lynches on what probably was Matthew’s birthday. Gansey always tried to stop himself from envying that sort of easy love they all had for each other and it filled him with both longing and gratitude that he’d been allowed to become a part of that family. In the photograph, they stood on the porch, Niall’s arm around Aurora, their three sons huddled up next to each other in front of them. Even Declan seemed to be cracking a smile, but what hit Gansey the most as he remembered the photograph was Ronan – a messy, trouble-loving boy, yet so much softer around the edges than the one who sat in front of him. It wasn’t only the lack of that ever-present scowl on his face, but the hair, too; the feather-like curls that all five Lynches seemed to share, albeit in different colors and states of messiness. 

As he fidgeted with the scissors he was still holding, Ronan lifted up his head, looked at Gansey and then in the mirror, and that was it. The purpling shadows under his eyes and the angry snarl-like set of his lips remained, hardened and carved into his sunken face, and the lack of shadow Ronan’s hair used to cast on it only strengthened the effect. Gone was the memory of a Lynch smirk that sometimes would turn into a genuine smile; gone were the gentle valleys of his brows raised in light surprise. 

Then it hit Gansey. Gone was the face that he had only seen several times before it appeared in black-and-white on top of a coffin, but with which Ronan had spend his life, from which he learned that mischievous smile.

Gone was Ronan Lynch, Niall Lynch’s son. In his place stood Ronan, a survivor. A sinner, resurrected, and Gansey suddenly felt a fraction of what it must have been like for Ronan to look in the mirror and see his father instead.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading! this has been waiting to be published for ages and now i've finally got around to it, so i hope you enjoyed reading this short little thing – if you did, please let me know!
> 
> ps did ronan get his tattoo before the buzzcut? i have no idea and at this point im too afraid to ask
> 
> ps2 the title can be roughly translated into died in the lifetime of the mother


End file.
